Charity begins at home, dear Ace

It comes as no surprise that Cuba has scored more than R80 million of South African taxpayers’ money for a useless “technical advisors programme” arranged by former Free State premier Ace Magashule. That’s because many of government’s leaders – and Magashule is the ANC’s secretary-general – appear trapped in a mid-’70s socialist time warp, where the Soviet regime in Moscow and its surrogates (led by Cuba) were fighting to overthrow Western capitalism.

The ANC has rewritten history to cast the Cubans as some of the main “liberators” of southern Africa, ignoring the reality that Fidel Castro’s troops in Angola, particularly, were supported by the Russians in terms of equipment and by the Angolan MPLA government, which paid for every Cuban soldier deployed.

The revenue from the foreign military deployments, along with Soviet budget subsidies and Eastern Bloc purchases of Cuban sugar, were what kept Cuba liquid in the ’80s.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Havana’s economy also folded and Castro and the others in his ruling junta had to look elsewhere.

And one of the places they looked was to their ANC comrades in South Africa, instituting all manner of schemes – ranging from the training of medical doctors to the repair and maintenance of military equipment, to the “technical advisory” scheme in the Free State.

All is, apparently, not forgotten in the international socialist revolution business … and the Cubans are getting their payback.

Why should SA continue to support a regime which only became involved in southern Africa for money in the first place?

Why should SA send hundreds of millions of rands abroad when that money could be better spent on personnel and services in this country?

We have news for the ANC: the Cold War is over. Our own cold realities mean charity must begin at home.